


the end is the beginning is the end

by ninemoons42



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Aftermath, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Cuddling & Snuggling, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Sharing Clothes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 06:02:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/922848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were standing at the end of the world and then, just as suddenly, they weren't. Hermann staggers away from LOCCENT, searching blindly for something that makes sense now that the clock has stopped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the end is the beginning is the end

**Author's Note:**

  * For [strigine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strigine/gifts).



It seems like he has to dodge excited faces and dancing feet every step of the way, but for once in his life, Hermann Gottlieb doesn’t complain about the fact that the way back to his quarters is easily twice as long as it normally should be.

He nods along when people call his name and applaud and whoop, but he doesn’t smile, and he doesn’t linger.

He’s still too stuck on that glimpse of Hercules Hansen’s face. He supposes the man is the Marshal now, the last Marshal of a Shatterdome that is about to be closed down, the last Marshal of the Jaeger Program. The title doesn’t really matter. What matters is what had to happen for him to get there.

Last words, the crackle and hiss of a faulty comms signal, pressure and motion against metal: and then the blast. He’d felt it though he was safe and dry and relatively warm. Those would not have been the last things going through the minds of Stacker Pentecost and Chuck Hansen. 

So Hermann cannot smile, not right now, because he knows that the war has been won, but he’s also seen, at first hand, the terrible cost of that victory.

They don’t even know yet if Mori and Becket will be okay. That had been touch and go for a while. They won’t be hearing from those two until they’ve cleared med bay, and who knows how long that will take. Being in the Anteverse, however briefly, will have done something to them.

He shakes his head, and sighs quietly, and a gaggle of techs spots him and moves aside. He doesn’t see the looks on their faces. He’s only aware of the fact that he’s fighting to suppress his own tears.

He wants to fall down into a bed - a real bed, not the less-than-utilitarian cot in his quarters - and pass out. He wants to head to his laboratory to catalogue the last sets of numbers before they can fade completely beneath the waves of his subconscious. The data will be needed - the documentary record must be completed. It’s what he has to do now in the last days.

But he wants to find a safe place, first. He doesn’t know why he wants to associate that feeling of safety with something warm and clean to wear. Certainly he will have to consign parts of what he’s wearing now to the hazmat bins. A walk in Kaiju Blue can’t have done his shoes, his trousers, any favors.

Hermann shudders as he forces open a set of doors, and he is so exhausted that it’s not until he looks up and clocks the rough sketches all over the desk, all over the walls, that he realizes that he’s not in his own room.

There is no rhyme or reason to the sketches, but there is only one hand at work here, and he picks up one piece of paper after another, running his fingertips over the inked lines as carefully as he can. 

Some of the portraits are of the living, and some are of the dead.

Hermann smiles despite himself. Here are the Kaidonovskys standing side by side; they don’t hold hands, here, but they don’t need to. Their heads are inclined towards each other. He can almost hear them whispering.

Here is Tendo, sleeping, despite what seems like a good half-dozen coffee mugs scattered about his desk. Not a hair on his head is out of place; his bowtie hangs undone, dangling precariously from his collar.

Here is one of the Wei triplets, wound up to throw something - the lines of the movement are very cleanly and clearly sketched out. The caption, off to the right side of the paper, is _ARF!_ , so now he knows that Max the bulldog is involved in this tableau somehow.

Here Hermann squeezes his eyes shut. He’d seen the uncomprehending look on the dog’s face at the moment of the first blast - the blast that took out Striker Eureka. 

He puts the sketch back down, and he misses the edge of Newton’s bed when he attempts to sit down. Now his tailbone is bruised; the metal floor in here is just as uncomfortable to sit on as that in his own quarters. He doesn’t really feel that physical pain; he feels something much more visceral than just that. His temples throb. There is a clawed hand gripping his heart.

Someone nearby makes a noise, and Hermann only hears himself choke on the sob that finally rips free from his throat.

Movement around him; his shoulders shaking but not of his own volition.

Hermann looks up. His vision swims. Newton must also be crying, if the fresh tracks down those stubbled cheeks are any indication.

“- can you hear me,” Newton is saying, over and over, through his sobs.

“Sorry I should go - ” Hermann hears himself say.

“No. Stay here.”

“All right.”

He lets Newton divest him of his jacket and sweater vest, and he mutely accepts the t-shirt that’s dropped into his hands. It is inexplicably warm, and it smells warm, too. Soft cotton, pilling a little around the seams. Slowly he struggles out of the rest of his layers - his shirt and undershirt.

Newton’s t-shirt hangs off his own frame, strangely oversized.

“Better?” Newton asks.

Hermann nods, and asks, “You should have your nose seen to.”

“Yeah. I got a first-aid kit here somewhere.”

“All right. Give it to me,” Hermann says. 

Newton only winces a little as Hermann swipes povidone-iodine into and around his nose; he looks like he’s had a second, worse nosebleed, after. All Newton says is, “Thanks.”

Hermann watches him get changed. He’s not surprised that Newton is inked all over, and he’s also not surprised that there is a bare patch remaining just in the small of his back. He knows that Newton is planning to break the theme by putting a familiar eagle-like symbol in that place: the last tattoo, the last image, a tribute to the fallen of the war.

Newton’s shirt is strangely comfortable, though it is thin, and they are sitting somewhere cold.

He scrambles up to sit on Newton’s cot, properly this time, and Newton joins him after a moment, jammed up against his entire left side, sitting touching from shoulders to knees.

Someone knocks on the door.

“Go away,” he says, and so does Newton.

The voice on the other side does not seem deterred. “You’ve been asked for; Rangers Mori and Becket want to talk to you.”

Hermann looks at Newton, and Newton looks back.

“I know you have questions,” Hermann says.

“And I can feel you making a list of yours,” Newton says.

“They will be - ahem - attempting to velcro right now.”

“Which is exactly what we’re doing, I think.”

“We should leave them to it. The questions can wait.”

Newton nods. “And I need to look after you, and you need to look after me.”

Hermann presses closer, puts his arm around Newton’s waist, and sighs in relief when Newton puts his arm around Hermann’s shoulders. 

“Doctors,” says the voice on the other side.

“Let them be,” someone else says, someone who is neither Hermann nor Newton.

A terrible and broken voice for all that it’s still powerful. Or perhaps the voice is powerful precisely because it sounds like it’s breaking up at the seams. 

The door opens, just enough for Hermann to see the lines in Marshal Hansen’s face, just enough to see how he’s holding on to Max’s leash, white knuckles in his good hand. “Debrief in twelve hours, gentlemen. I will speak with you then. Your help will still be needed now.”

Hermann nods.

“And - thank you,” the Marshal says. “For everything.”

“Thank you, Marshal,” Newton says, formal and grave.

Hansen nods, once, and closes the door.

Newton shifts closer, puts his forehead on Hermann’s shoulder.

Hermann puts his other arm around Newton, and lets himself be drawn closer, and they shiver together, in the aftermath.


End file.
